Super Bowl -- absurd but all-American

Published 10:00 pm, Sunday, January 29, 2006

In an episode of "The Simpsons" last year, the NFL hired Homer Simpson to produce the Super Bowl halftime show.

The only thing sillier would have been a plot line that had the Seattle Seahawks playing in the big game.

Funny how the absurd becomes the absolute. And how the two terms meet, like linebacker and running back, in a discussion of the Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl encompasses the absurd and the absolute like no other icon in American pop culture. It is the ultimate guilty pleasure, indulged in by millions looking for a midwinter cheeseburger amid their post-holiday embrace of the virtuous and the calorie-free.

How's this for absurd? With $2.5 million, you can buy 30 seconds of advertising time on ABC's telecast of the Super Bowl next Sunday.

For the same money, you could engage Mercy Corps to buy 12,000 cows for poor families around the world. And have some money left over for a couple of Clydesdales.

Here's the absolute: Without its obvious and cherished excesses, the Super Bowl would cease being the absolute paragon of kitsch. And where would we be then?

We need the Super Bowl the way we need fabric softener. Without it, life goes on blissfully unaffected. With it, even though it's unnecessary and meaningless in the larger scheme, life gets a little extra bounce.

The media latched onto this realization early, and they made it the phenomenon it continues to be. True, the first Super Bowl in 1967 had nearly 40,000 empty seats at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Hey, everything that becomes cool has to start off cold. The NFL now issues about 3,000 media credentials for the Super Bowl. A few in that horde of scribblers and screechers actually cover the game. With good reason. The 10 most-watched TV shows in this country, based on total number of viewers, are Super Bowl telecasts.

Why?

Why not?

"Unlike other major sporting events, such as the World Series or the NBA Finals or the Masters, it's a one-day event," writes Roger Staubach. "You crown the champion that day."

Staubach, the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback and most valuable player of Super Bowl VI, has a point. Americans are devotees of Short-Attention-Span Theater. In a four-hour period watching the Super Bowl, we can see a championship sporting event, a performance by popular entertainers of the day and a raft of clever commercials that will amuse, provoke and even inspire.

Four years ago, Paul Hewson, better known as Bono from the rock group U2, performed at the game and called the Super Bowl "the very heart of America."

Actually, if you're attending the event, you are anything but the heart of America. Rather, you are reasonably affluent. Or you are exceedingly well-connected. More likely, you are both.

The heart of America stays home and watches on TV. The heart of America kicks back, overindulges, looks forward to bypass surgery. Accordingly, in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, Frito-Lay increases production of its snack products by 10 million pounds.

So, is the Super Bowl really worth an extra bag of chips?

Of course not. The main event is often anti-climactic, the pregame punditry vacuous and the halftime show underwhelming, save for the occasional partial nudity, which is now forbidden because it violates the NFL's policy of conducting a Super Bowl in locations where there might be a nip in the air.

And still we watch. Then again, America will watch anything. Put Roman numerals on it and it's like required reading.

That brings us to Detroit, host to Super Bowl XL, where teams of underdressed women will writhe on the sidelines and use their sexuality to enhance our appreciation of hypocrisy. Luckily, because the game is indoors at Layoff Field, the cheerleaders will be able to perform in full dishabille. Here's a Super Bowl prediction: Cleavage 7, Thighs 6.

Last year, when Homer Simpson couldn't come up with an idea for the halftime show, he enlisted the aid of his aggressively pious neighbor, Ned Flanders.

The result was a re-creation of the biblical story of Noah, which football fans roundly panned as being too wholesome and decent.

It was an easy spoof of the previous year's pop-culture sensation: the brief but worldwide telecast of Janet Jackson's right breast during the halftime show of Super Bowl XXXVIII.

But it was so much more.

Only a country that professes Victorian values while shopping at Victoria's Secret can find substantial meaning in the Super Bowl.

Making fun of the absurdity is a piece of cake.

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But is there a better reflection -- in a shallow pond, no less -- of who we are?